Brand You!

Have you ever heard anyone tell you that you need to work on your "brand"? It's quite the buzz in marketing circles. It can also be a tricky concept to truly "get".

The December 2014 issue of More magazine had a nice set of articles about your business brand. Some of it was clearly geared to more traditional corporate / big businesses but it did have a nice wrap-up of what "brand" is.

"10 Things Your Personal Brand Is Not:

1. Your job
2. Your resume
3. Your elevator pitch
4. Your network
5. Your LinkedIn profile
6. Your leadership roles
7. Your Google-search results
8. Your style of dress
9. Your way of relating to others
10. Your office décor

Your Personal Brand IS:

What you stand for and your reputation -- what others say about you when you leave the room. That doesn't boil down to any one of the things on the list [above]. But put them all together and these elements communicate to the outside world who you are and how you see yourself."

Brand is definitely about more than our education, our modalities, or our professional society. It's about who we are in our essence, how we communicate that in everything, and how the public perceives us.

More than one MT has pointed out, for example, that you should never assume your clients will never see your Facebook posts in massage therapy groups. If you are  all "sunshine and light" in the massage room but all "bitch and moan" in other forums, you run the risk of cross-contamination as it were.

Yet we all need places to vent, to let our hair down, and occasionally to complain about some of the aggravations of our work. That's why it's good to be connected to your local MT community, an alumni association, a supervising therapist, or just some MT buddies. A place you can relax and share the realities of our work (though probably not the local coffee shop because you your clients probably go there too).

AND it's good to sit back every now and then and ponder (or even do a little research) about how clients and potential clients think of us, what they think our highest values are, what they learn about our core essence from our resume / elevator pitch / FB profile / etc. If you are brave and strong you will ask a good and trusted friend to help you with this and you will listen carefully and be grateful for their help.

Then you will either (1) relax knowing that your "brand" is just what you want or (2) start working on that.